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“... other members of her family and her circle of acquaintance. Those of Eliza de Feuillide and Fanny Knight (and the latter’s diaries), to which Park Honan draws attention, are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests ...”

“... own epitaph, which was carved in black marble. It read: Here lie the Ashes of Henry Rider Haggard Knight Bachelor Knight of the British Empire Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country Nothing there about his ripping yarns, the first of which had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever ...”

“... the younger sons were expected to provide for themselves. One way of doing this was to become a Knight of Malta: another was to join the Navy. Young Suffren did both, being admitted to the Order as an absentee minor when he was a child and at 14 going to the naval college before joining the Solide as a cadet and seeing some action in the confused battle off ...”

“... of St Francis had taken a vow of poverty. At the Great Khan’s reception, he met some envoys from India who presented the ruler with eight leopards and ten greyhounds trained to ride horseback. William’s humble gifts of fruit and wine could scarcely compete. The Mongol court took more interest in his precious vestments and illuminated manuscripts, donated ...”

“... said Miss Postlethwaite, in answer to our concerned gaze, ‘but he’s just gone off to India, leaving her standing tight-lipped and dry-eyed in the moonlight outside the old Manor. And her little dog has crawled up and licked her hand, as if he understood and sympathised.’ P.G. Wodehouse, Best-Seller At half past nine that evening Edwina’s ...”

“... for the national anthem but had little idea what the colonial enterprise was about.After going to India to become a soldier, Geoffrey Selwyn had gone on to a farming apprenticeship in Uganda. The First World War took him to the Western Front. In his short, unpublished memoir, ‘Scenes from My Life’, he describes how, ‘thoroughly fed up with the mud of ...”

“... Brooke and Mr Causaubon, the Emperor in his non-existent new clothes and Calvino’s Non-Existent Knight. With those characters the reader already knows, Textermination offers the pleasures of both recognition and novelty: we see people we know in fresh contexts. The reader’s self-congratulation may be checked as he encounters characters beyond his ken, but ...”

“... The photograph shows him next to the Duke of Grafton while assuming his stall at Windsor as a Knight of the Garter, and the action was the compiling (would that be the word?) of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who – oh, dash it, I don’t know – shall we say made money rather than earned it? Anyway, in the photograph Wilson looks like ...”

“... not ‘won’ or ‘lost’ by either side – it was, he wrote, ‘a war in which the Black Knight, power, was challenged by the White Knight’ of a popular movement determined to have its say. Though not irrelevant, the violence of the jousts was never the real point. What counted was that part of the public which ...”

“... Naipaul asked me to write an introduction to the 2017 Pan Macmillan combined edition of his three India books. I spent time with him in New York, I travelled with him in India, and I saw him in hospital in London just before he died in 2018.More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet ...”

“... thought was given in London to a proposal that Iraq should be annexed, not by Britain, but by India acting as a sort of second-generation imperialist, and providing territory for Indians to settle and colonise. This was the high time or late tubercular flush of imperial thinking, the era of Rhodes and Milner as well as of Balfour, and the concept of an ...”

“... The​ Soviet-subsidised mobile bookshops that enlivened my provincial childhood in the India of the late 1970s and early 1980s always had, in among the English translations of Marx, Lenin and various socialist realist novels, an edition of Alexander Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? The title was irresistible and its theme of stupor and futility in the provinces seemed both contemporary and urgent ...”

“... John’s day. It was widely believed that Prester John was indeed ruling Christians, probably in India, and intrepid travellers tried to seek him out. He began turning up in accounts of imaginary voyages, including Mandeville’s Travels. There are many medieval maps on which Prester John’s domain is confidently located. This has been Eco’s materia ...”

“... That’s obviously not the case and people are now seeing that.’ The Daily Mail quoted Julian Knight, chair of the Commons culture committee and a member of the NZSG: ‘In the short term, [Johnson] needs to abolish the VAT on energy bills and get rid of the green taxes.’ In March, Nigel Farage wrote in the Mail on Sunday that ‘net zero is net ...”

“... Getting the saltpetre was only the start, however; it was a long time before supply, largely from India, could match demand. You then had to prevent the mixed or mealed ingredients from absorbing water and failing to work (no easy business on campaign in Northern Europe), and to prevent early guns, with their forged barrels, from blowing up. The ...”